Update on the New Luminary Backpacks

Victor, Fong, Lisa, and Nik discuss the shoulder straps on the Luminary 14.

As we shared back in May, Tom has been working on new versions of the original Luminary 10 and the new size Luminary 14. An update on the progress of the Luminary was included in our recent blog post on the design process. After we posted that update, Tom took additional feedback into account and added yet another feature and another design update to the bag, which added to the bag’s development timeline.

As of today, both the Luminary 10 and Luminary 14 designs are complete. Yay! But not so fast: while the designs have been completed, Tom, Nik, Lisa, and Fong are currently working together to make sure the packs are manufacturable as efficiently and accurately as possible. Given our limited production capacity, ensuring we can make large production runs of this small but complex backpack is essential.

Part of our process of adding a new design to our offerings is to make a PPB (Pre-Production Batch) of the bag prior to making them available for pre-order. The PPB is primarily intended to serve as the first large-scale test of the efficiency of manufacturing the new design. Taking into consideration the time needed to produce two PPBs (one for each Luminary) and looking at our already full production schedule, we estimate that it won’t be until early next year until both the Luminary 10 and Luminary 14 are available for pre-order. Yes, that’s right: 2019. We know that this is going to be a disappointment for those of you who have already been waiting for the Luminary. We never want to disappoint people if we can help it. We find it’s sometimes a fine line between keeping everyone in the loop — so informed decisions can be made — and sharing too much in the way of the progress of a design, providing an estimated timeline (later edited/updated) as we did in this post. This time we were on the wrong side of that fine line and for that we’re sorry. And if you’ll forgive us this: we’re admittedly darn stubborn when it comes to delaying stuff to get the details as perfect as they can be. We want to present to you the best version of a bag we can make.

With the production capacity this decision frees up, more existing designs will remain in-stock, we’ll be able to surprise you with the couple of things long since planned for around the holidays, and when we do offer the Luminaries for pre-order, we will be able to offer a second pre-order soon after just in case they are so popular they fly right out the door.

We’ll share another update once we’re ready to offer the Luminary 10 and Luminary 14 for pre-order. If you’d like, you can sign up on the Luminary 10 page to be notified via email as soon as both the Luminary 10 and Luminary 14 are made available for pre-order. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post ’em in response here or emailus@tombihn.com.